My mentor would design systems by going into a company and saying, “What’s your idea of the perfect system?” The parallels are really uncanny compared to the way the Profit Method works and the way he envisioned creating systems for customers. One of the things he always said was, “If a company’s going to invest in custom software, then the software should work the way the company works and not make the company change to fit the software.

We did a few projects together and then in 2000, I went out on my own. I just kept that same method of building systems. It’s really the only way I know. But it has been a win/win situation for both my customers and me.

This solution took another year to develop and since it was non-profit, there was quite a discount applied. It was developed for $30,000.00.

It provides the ability to track incoming and outgoing messages and internal messages within the church offices. As a parishioner, if you call the church office, they look up the name and a picture of the person is displayed. They take a message, which goes into a database and gets routed to the proper person. It also includes follow-ups and reminders for tracking follow-ups on issues and parishioners needs.

The database enables church ministers to coordinate the care of the families of anyone who is connected with the church in any way, whether it’s a member, another minister or relative of somebody from the church. There is a view for the family and the members of that family, and a view for the individual.

For parishioners, the solution tracks all personal information, notes, all the ministries they are in or have been in, when they started and what their status is. It has the ability to track the history of their giving. For any given year, staff can pull up a summary of giving and drill down into the detail of giving over the years.

Then there is a whole ministry section where they can manage every ministry in the church. There are over 60 ministries in this particular church.

The inventory system manages all aspects of shipping. The church has a complete inventory of items its received over the years—a whole history. From there, staff can build donation records and pack the shipments. They can take clothes and other items received and put them in bags, boxes, crates, barrels or containers.

They can build shipments and the shipment inventory will print for them. If they’re shipping to Peru, they have the option to print the shipping report in Spanish.

The Peruvian government is very strict about what comes into its country so the church needed a report that would really define a shipment. So, it will list all of the loose items but if there are medical boxes, it will list the box number and list the contents of that box. If there is medication in that box, it will list the quantity of pills in a pillbox, and what the medical name is, and what the expiration date is. So, its very detailed.

One of the biggest advantages that they just love is their ability to open the file of the caller and a picture of the person they’re speaking to comes up. All of the members’ pictures are in the system, so whenever you pull up somebody’s name, you can see their picture.

Now they can enter their reports for the week within the system. When the Ministry Board meets twice a week, they can pull up a section called “Review Ministry Reports,” and each person can review a different ministry. This feature along dramatically decreases the amount of time they have to spend reviewing ministry reports.

When they complete their review of the reports they can add comments underneath the report and they can change the color so they know that this comment is from the Ministry Board. And then, they just click one button that says, “done”. Then when the ministry leaders return to the office they can check their reports and know they’ve been reviewed because there will be a checkmark on the report showing that it was reviewed.

Everything is staged, ready to be shipped. It’s all in the system. It’s all inventoried.

Then the inventories will get entered into the system. They get entered into what they call a donation work file and they do this as another piece of accountability. They do this to make sure all of the numbers match, and that they’re in balance. Once they know they’re in balance, with what the donation was then they can proceed with the next step, and with a click of a button, they can move that entire donation into the physical inventory

And then, from the physical inventory, they determine what method will be used to prepare for shipping. If it’s items that need to be packed, they can build packages. They can go into the packing section and if it’s clothes, they can start a new bag and they can drill down to the inventory and pick clothes that have come in and put them in a bag. They can print the packing list to show what’s in all of their bags, and then from there they build shipments, and they can pick their loose items to ship, and they can pick their bags, and boxes, and barrels, and crates, and gaylords, and anything you can imagine will ship. They shipped a fire truck once.

So far it seems like you’re focusing on the small business area and you’ve actually proven that the Profit Method works there, also. It works just as well for small business as it does large business.

Well, one of the principles of the Profit Method is that you create the software and it provides tremendous benefit from day one. But the secret is that you continue to use the software and continue to get those benefits on an annual basis, so it compounds itself. Now if you implemented a Profit Method project ten years ago and you’re still using it today, you’ve compounded the benefits of that throughout those ten years. And it looks like all these companies are still using the original solution.